Along the lines of that video posted about changing things:[quote]The police motorcycles came out of nowhere and blocked the intersection of Kingsway and..."/>

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Are today's marches a useful tactic or just political nostalgia?

POSTED BY: NIKI2
UPDATED: Sunday, November 28, 2010 06:51
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Saturday, November 27, 2010 9:17 AM

NIKI2

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...


Along the lines of that video posted about changing things:
Quote:

The police motorcycles came out of nowhere and blocked the intersection of Kingsway and Theobald's Road in central London. The bus came to a sudden stop and remained motionless.

What the heck? I walked forward to ask the driver what was going on and then I heard whistles and drums and indistinct chanting. I no longer needed to ask. The kids from the University of London were marching to protest tuition fee rises.

The driver let us off and I hurried to my meeting at Bush House, home of the BBC World Service. By the time I came out, the University of London students had been joined by others from LSE and King's College some bearing signs that read: "Tory Scum/Here we Come."

Political marching, protest marching, call it what you will, has become in the new millennium a way of exercising one's ego. When making a programme recently on the history of protest marching I asked folks over and over again why they went on marches?

"To make my voice heard," was the usual reply. Really? Even if the government isn't listening?

Making one's voice heard wasn't the reason people went on marches at the beginning.

The first successful political march in England took place in 1834. Six agricultural workers from Tolpuddle in Dorset had been transported to Australia in chains. Their crime? Organisaing a society to prevent a cut in their wages.

For the Tolpuddle Martyrs, as they were called, transportation to Australia was a sentence of living death and tens of thousands of workers marched from King's Cross to Parliament to present a petition signed by 800,000 people demanding the six be allowed to return to Britain.

Parliament gave in to the pressure, and the men were allowed to come home.

Over the next century and a half, the political march became an important tool all over the world for those seeking political change and redress of injustice.

Marching did not always work and often ended in violence whether in Chicago's Haymarket Square in 1886 or outside the Winter Palace in St Petersburgin 1905.

But the rallies frequently produced pressure that led to dramatic change. Successful marching campaigns have certain things in common. They need to have a very specific goal and it should be focused on gaining a positive - independence, civil rights a decent wage - rather than repealing a negative.

In the summer of 1963, Martin Luther King and other leaders of the civil rights movement staged the March on Washington to bring pressure on then President John F Kennedy for legislation guaranteeing African-American's constitutional rights in the South, where segregation had disenfranchised them for more than eight decades.

Act of political nostalgia

Despite Kennedy Administration concerns about the potential for violence, the march went off without a hitch. King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech which guaranteed that the march would become one of the most famous in history.

It also made marching the template for the full range of political protest associated with the 1960s. Martin Luther King would later march in Alabama from Selma to the state capitol Montgomery. The violence from local authorities that greeted the marchers led to an international outcry and hastened the passage of civil rights legislation in Washington DC.

Marches against the Vietnam War filled out the decade. Sometimes there was violence, as in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Party convention and in 1970 at Kent State University in Ohio. But often the marches, with their hundreds of thousands of participants, went off without a hitch, their main purpose being to remind politicians of the war's deep unpopularity.

It wasn't just in the English speaking world that the 60s marked a high-water mark for political marching. French students marching through Paris in May 1968 provoked disproportionate violence from the government of Charles De Gaulle. This in turn cost the government its support in France at large, and the government fell.

Today, marching seems to be a retro activity, an act of political nostalgia more than a tactic to bring about specific change. Very few of those who walk the streets "making their voices heard" would be willing to go much further to change politics.

Marching is a right in free societies. Political leaders tolerate marching but don't fear it. When more than a million and half people marched through London in February 2003 to protest the impending war with Iraq, it changed absolutely nothing.

In America, there have been million man and million women marches that echo Dr King's March on Washington, but they seem to want nothing more than television camera time.

This has culminated in television personalities taking over the march on Washington business.

The two big rallies held this past election season were organised by TV stars Glenn Beck and John Stewart. I wonder what the future of political marching is. Clearly, it has become a fun day out and chance to be among like-minded people who wanted to make "their voices heard," or "show politicians I disagree."

Yes, well, thank you for sharing.

If protest marching is ever going to be a useful political tactic again, those who put one foot in front of another are going to have be willing to take a bit more risk.

Civil disobedience would be the next step, with jail time a possible consequence of one's actions. How many students protesting tuition rises would risk that?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-11849259

I'm very much afraid he's got a good point, and it saddens me greatly. Looking at them, it seems to make his point:




Hippie Operative Nikovich Nikita Nicovna Talibani,
Contracted Agent of Veritas Oilspillus, code name “Nike”,
signing off





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Saturday, November 27, 2010 9:54 AM

CANTTAKESKY


I see three non-violent avenues of change:

1. Embarrassing the government, via media, to make minor concessions. This would include things like protests.

Example: TSA has changed its policy towards pilots and children under 12.

2. Humanizing our future generations.

Example: what Frem does.

3. Making old technology obsolete with new technology.

Example: invention of cars made the horse and buggy obsolete.

--Can't Take (my gorram) Sky

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Saturday, November 27, 2010 10:29 AM

HKCAVALIER


Y'know, I guess I'm in a mood today but this guy. You know what made all those protests he is so nostalgic for cool? The fact that the government was willing to shoot/beat/hose the protesters. That's what made them "important," and that's what our modern protests lack. Yeah, blame the protesters! We now live in a world where the powerful are not moved by marches; back then, they were. And in some places in the world, a march will still elicit violence from the governing elite.

Christ, be thankful for the good things in life, like people not getting shot at just for marching in the streets.

Now, o' course, since our government isn't threatened by marches anymore, then you have to up the anti if you seek to threaten our government into submitting to your will. Sorry.

HKCavalier

Hey, hey, hey, don't be mean. We don't have to be mean, because, remember, no matter where you go, there you are.

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Saturday, November 27, 2010 11:39 AM

WHOZIT


Quote:

Originally posted by Niki2:
Along the lines of that video posted about changing things:
Quote:

The police motorcycles came out of nowhere and blocked the intersection of Kingsway and Theobald's Road in central London. The bus came to a sudden stop and remained motionless.

What the heck? I walked forward to ask the driver what was going on and then I heard whistles and drums and indistinct chanting. I no longer needed to ask. The kids from the University of London were marching to protest tuition fee rises.

The driver let us off and I hurried to my meeting at Bush House, home of the BBC World Service. By the time I came out, the University of London students had been joined by others from LSE and King's College some bearing signs that read: "Tory Scum/Here we Come."

Political marching, protest marching, call it what you will, has become in the new millennium a way of exercising one's ego. When making a programme recently on the history of protest marching I asked folks over and over again why they went on marches?

"To make my voice heard," was the usual reply. Really? Even if the government isn't listening?

Making one's voice heard wasn't the reason people went on marches at the beginning.

The first successful political march in England took place in 1834. Six agricultural workers from Tolpuddle in Dorset had been transported to Australia in chains. Their crime? Organisaing a society to prevent a cut in their wages.

For the Tolpuddle Martyrs, as they were called, transportation to Australia was a sentence of living death and tens of thousands of workers marched from King's Cross to Parliament to present a petition signed by 800,000 people demanding the six be allowed to return to Britain.

Parliament gave in to the pressure, and the men were allowed to come home.

Over the next century and a half, the political march became an important tool all over the world for those seeking political change and redress of injustice.

Marching did not always work and often ended in violence whether in Chicago's Haymarket Square in 1886 or outside the Winter Palace in St Petersburgin 1905.

But the rallies frequently produced pressure that led to dramatic change. Successful marching campaigns have certain things in common. They need to have a very specific goal and it should be focused on gaining a positive - independence, civil rights a decent wage - rather than repealing a negative.

In the summer of 1963, Martin Luther King and other leaders of the civil rights movement staged the March on Washington to bring pressure on then President John F Kennedy for legislation guaranteeing African-American's constitutional rights in the South, where segregation had disenfranchised them for more than eight decades.

Act of political nostalgia

Despite Kennedy Administration concerns about the potential for violence, the march went off without a hitch. King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech which guaranteed that the march would become one of the most famous in history.

It also made marching the template for the full range of political protest associated with the 1960s. Martin Luther King would later march in Alabama from Selma to the state capitol Montgomery. The violence from local authorities that greeted the marchers led to an international outcry and hastened the passage of civil rights legislation in Washington DC.

Marches against the Vietnam War filled out the decade. Sometimes there was violence, as in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Party convention and in 1970 at Kent State University in Ohio. But often the marches, with their hundreds of thousands of participants, went off without a hitch, their main purpose being to remind politicians of the war's deep unpopularity.

It wasn't just in the English speaking world that the 60s marked a high-water mark for political marching. French students marching through Paris in May 1968 provoked disproportionate violence from the government of Charles De Gaulle. This in turn cost the government its support in France at large, and the government fell.

Today, marching seems to be a retro activity, an act of political nostalgia more than a tactic to bring about specific change. Very few of those who walk the streets "making their voices heard" would be willing to go much further to change politics.

Marching is a right in free societies. Political leaders tolerate marching but don't fear it. When more than a million and half people marched through London in February 2003 to protest the impending war with Iraq, it changed absolutely nothing.

In America, there have been million man and million women marches that echo Dr King's March on Washington, but they seem to want nothing more than television camera time.

This has culminated in television personalities taking over the march on Washington business.

The two big rallies held this past election season were organised by TV stars Glenn Beck and John Stewart. I wonder what the future of political marching is. Clearly, it has become a fun day out and chance to be among like-minded people who wanted to make "their voices heard," or "show politicians I disagree."

Yes, well, thank you for sharing.

If protest marching is ever going to be a useful political tactic again, those who put one foot in front of another are going to have be willing to take a bit more risk.

Civil disobedience would be the next step, with jail time a possible consequence of one's actions. How many students protesting tuition rises would risk that?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-11849259

I'm very much afraid he's got a good point, and it saddens me greatly. Looking at them, it seems to make his point:




Hippie Operative Nikovich Nikita Nicovna Talibani,
Contracted Agent of Veritas Oilspillus, code name “Nike”,
signing off





You libs ARE nostalgia, you're relics of a by-gone era. The "Tea Party" is new and fresh, Joy Behar is old and ugly. We have Sarah Palin, you have Kathy Griffin who's old and ugly. You also have Keith Olbermann......and he's stupid.

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Saturday, November 27, 2010 11:43 AM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


"Christ, be thankful for the good things in life, like people not getting shot at just for marching in the streets."

Well, they still are - also on a more minor note beaten and arrested. (Plus ending up on 'lists'.) But the marches are marginalized to outlying areas and the media won't cover the unprovoked government violence. What march? What beatings? Never happened. At least people aren't being disappeared, and everyone else too uneasy to ask where they went.

The problem with the marches being made invisible is that people of common mind end up feeling isolated and very, very vulnerable. Marches may not do much to sway the upper-ups, but they create common identity with the marchers, and with that identity create a movement - an ongoing push in one direction. That's why teabaggers feel so empowered, despite being a small fraction of the population as a whole.

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Sunday, November 28, 2010 6:35 AM

FREMDFIRMA



I hate to say this, but...

Useless.

See, protest marches evolved out of peasant riots, and without the very real possibilty having your castle burnt down while you are torn limb from limb by an angry mob - without the THREAT, the potential of violence, no one will take you seriously.

All todays marches do is gather the resisters in one spot for easy "processing" via kettling and ye olde stomping, which the media, if it covers at all, will do so in a fashion uncomplimentary to make you look like idiots - and for the record, asking "permission" to protest is asinine, as is playing by a set of rules handed down by folk seeing to neutralize your every effort.

THIS is what happens when you "play nice"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_model

As opposed to when you DO play "rough" like the battle in Seattle over the WTO, which despite the protestors playing hardball, BECAUSE OF THAT, was not only less violent overall, it was actually effective in something more than getting a lot of protestors hurt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Trade_Organization_Ministerial_Conf
erence_of_1999_protest_activity


The idea that the police will be reluctant to stomp you, well, that comes from a time when most authority figures weren't trained and conditioned pyschopaths and sadists, and that is not today - from the 82nd Airborne confiscating arms during Katrina, to Abu Gharib, to the TSA Shakedown, it's all "Just following orders", NO MATTER WHAT.

These people (and I use the term lightly) would have massacred Ghandi and his followers cause his methods depended on the military and society he was up against having a certain minimum of conscience, which todays america does not have.

No, protest, while having it's place, is not the effective tool today it once was, better to turn their own surveillence society against them (while they try to mandate filming YOU, and outlaw filming THEM, of course), turning their own factions upon each other in a circular firing squad, and embarrassing/humiliating them at every corner - the internet is an excellent tool for this, as shown by how the pebble kicked by a single airline pilot has raised a shitstorm of epic proportion against the TSA, yes ?

NEW tactics, NEW methods, and technology are the means by which these battles will be fought, because all you do most of the time with a conventional protest these days is put the resisters all in one place with a fucking bullseye on top of them, to be pounded into the ground as an object lesson by unaccountable pyschos with nightsticks while the conditioned public cheers them on.

-Frem

I do not serve the Blind God.

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Sunday, November 28, 2010 6:51 AM

KANEMAN


The day for marches by unwashed hippies and dopeheads is long past. The new march is much smaller and done on a local scale by real Americans. It is very effective still, look at the tea party and what they accomplished in the bloodbath of 2010 simply by taking to the corner of main street and talking to their fellow Americans. When considering how young it is, one has to come to the conclusion it may be the most influential movement the world has ever seen. They single handedly brought Obama's socialist agenda to a crashing hault with a mandate from real Americans. The revolution continues.....Power to the people,..Glorious.

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